Recent years have seen several 100-year anniversaries of the women’s vote, and today universal and equal suffrage is an inseparable part of democracy. Dawn Teele’s book, Forging the Franchise, is an inquiry into the reasons why male politicians elected by male voters gave women the right to vote in the United Kingdom, the United States, and France. It offers a theory of the political origins that focuses on electoral expediency and mobilization of women’s groups and it provides quantitative evidence from the three countries. It argues that women got the right to vote when the incumbents saw and needed an electoral advantage of expanding the right to vote to females. The book is of interest not only to those who want a deeper understanding of the historical process of women’s enfranchisement or who are interested in the political economy of democratization, but to everyone with a concern about gender inequality in politics today.

We examine the link between the threat of violence and democratization in the context of the Great Reform Act passed by the British Parliament in 1832. We geo-reference the so-called Swing riots, which occurred between the 1830 and 1831 parliamentary elections, and compute the number of these riots that happened within a 10 km radius of the 244 English constituencies. Our empirical analysis relates this constituency-specific measure of the threat perceptions held by the 344,000 voters in the Unreformed Parliament to the share of seats won in each constituency by pro-reform politicians in 1831. We find that the Swing riots induced voters to vote for pro-reform politicians after experiencing first-hand the violence of the riots.

Many democracies operate consumer debt relief programs. These are often implemented or adjusted during the election cycle, but their political effects are not well-understood. We investigate if debt relief can influence high-stakes elections. We utilize quasi-experimental variation generated by a very large privately-funded debt relief program enacted in the Republic of Georgia during the presidential election in 2018 that affected every sixth voter. We estimate that the program helped the incumbent candidate win that election, and that its effects persisted. Overall, we show how economic power can translate into political power in a democracy.

In an interconnected world, economic and political interests inevitably reach beyond national borders. Since policy choices generate external economic and political costs, foreign state and non-state actors have an interest in influencing policy actions in other sovereign countries to their advantage. Foreign influence is a strategic choice aimed at internalizing these externalities and takes three principal forms: (i) voluntary agreements, (ii) policy interventions based on rewarding or sanctioning the target country to obtain a specific change in policy, and (iii) institution interventions aimed at influencing the political institutions in the target country. We propose a unifying theoretical framework to study when foreign influence is chosen and in which form, and use it to organize and evaluate the new political economics literature on foreign influence along with work in cognate disciplines

We report robust evidence of a new short-run monetary election cycle: the monthly growth rate of the money supply (M1) around elections is higher than in other months in a sample of low- and middle-income countries. We hypothesize this is related to systemic vote buying. Consistent with this, we find no cycle in authoritarian countries and countries with strong political institutions and a pronounced cycle in elections where international election monitors reported vote buying or in close elections. Using survey data on daily consumer expenditures, we show that within-household consumption of food increases in the days before elections.